Heads and tails

The firefly walked slowly on the ceramic surface of the tea cup. It was moving slowly towards the border, its wings fluttering slightly. Seated at the table a stallion was observing the insect with calm eyes. He had a brown coat and his mane, only a few shades darker than the coat, was styled in spikes. There was a green bow tie around his neck and a cute mark depicting a golden hourglass adorned his flank. His face was a mask of composure.

“Oh my, it seems today will be one of those days…” he said in a flat uninterested tone to the mare seated in front of him. The said mare was like his reflection in a mirror: same brown coat, same spiky dark mane and, very unusual thing, the same cutie mark. The only differences were the papillon bow tie and the thinner frame.

“I’d highly prefer if you wouldn’t use those terms. Expressions like ‘today’ or ‘those days’ are misleading and inappropriate. After all, we haven’t seen a different day in a long time” she answered in a similar tone.

“Three millions three hundred fifty four thousand and seventeen loops if I’m not mistaking” he said, and immediately added “and I never mistake when it comes to number, but you should know that, right?”

“Did you counted all the ones in which we died? We agreed to not count those ones. Consider that we are not sure that the timeline survives us until midnight, so we can’t literally speak of complete loops,” the mare adjusted her bow tie and the stallion mimicked her in a perfectly symmetrical pose.

“I disagreed later”

“In a death-loop, if I remember well, and I’m not counting those.”

The stallion leant his back to the chair’s seatback “My my, we have reached an impasse.”

“You are bringing up Lowland Unicorn again? We are physicists. Speaking another language is not our cup of tea” she pointed at the cup in front of her “you don’t look more intelligent doing it.”

“Au contraire, ma soeur. But let me return to my previous topic. As I was saying before, the firefly flew on my cup not on my spoon, plus it’s sunny and the couple on your left hasn’t argued aloud over the fact that she’s probably sleeping with half of Ponyville’s male population. It means that this is one of those loops in which Mr. Pokey Pierce gets so mad at Miss Pinkie Pie’s rejection to satisfy his sexual urges that he beat the mare and proceed to date rape her.”

She stared at him with a slightly dubious look “Are you sure this four facts are connected? The ability to predict things doesn’t go too well with your precious quantistic theory. After all everything happens randomly, that is your creed.” There was no perceptible sarcasm in her emotionless voice, but he knew she was being ironic.

“Tut tut, are you still mad because this loops are all different from each other as I predicted? Because you thought that events would repeat every time except for what we changed? You should try to pass your little fatalistic phase. There is no purpose in reality, everything happens casually everytime and, at the same time,  it doesn’t, the cat is both alive and dead. The coins are always the same ones but we can only see half of the sides. And we won’t see that combination of sides ever again. This doesn’t mean the coins don’t influence each other, making some combination more probable and therefore predictable.”

“I guess Celestia does play dices.” the mare admitted as she finished her tea in the same moment the stallion did. “So this loops will be indeed infinite, you say? We can’t try every possibility to stop them as they are endless. We won’t be able to see a different day ever again?”

The stallion actually smiled this time, a rare occurrence. “Why, of course they are. You thought we could escape? That maybe making happy a group of mares at a party, or something like this, will convince Fate or the Universe to let us go? Pardon me, but it sounds like a childish dream.” He stopped for a moment “So much differences between us for a X-chromosome, isn’t it true?”

The pair got up and started to walk outside of the bar, when the mare said “My apologies if I refuse to contract your existential pessimism. Plus,” she stopped and brushed her tail against her companion’s flank “you seemed to enjoy the differences in plenty of occasions.”

“You refer to all those sexual intercourses we had? It’s been your idea, you wanted to try everything to stop the loops. But I admit they have been very entertaining. I will remember for a while the time I deflowered you in front of the Cutie Mark Crusaders. The looks on their faces were priceless.”

“I only wish my hymen wouldn’t grow back everytime.”

“It has never been broken.”

They walked along the streets of Ponyville for a couple of hours, they watched ponies they saw thousands of times doing the exact same things they always did with only small changes. They watched and felt nothing, emotions and morals have been drained from them from what felt like years before, and only one stimulus remained in their brain anymore…

“I’m bored” said the mare.

“Why, the little conversation we had before didn’t satisfy your intellect enough?”

“We had that exact conversation plenty of times. Five hundreds and sixty-nine to be precise.”

“What about some physical satisfaction instead? We could get you a stallion to have sex with, or a mare, if you prefer. I’ve heard Rainbow Dash…”

“I don’t feel like having any type of sexual experience. Besides I already slept with everypony and dragon in this town, of both sexes, and so did you. There is hardly any significant change. We need a new objective, something hard that we can’t achieve in only one try. That should keep our minds busy.”

“Something dangerous and intellectually challenging?”

“Preferably...”

The silence descended between the two as they tried to work something out. After some time a question broke that silence, pronounced in perfect synchrony by two voices.

“Do you think it’s possible to kill Princess Celestia?”